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3.9.1 Scope

 This project has covered just two sample populations: accounting students and accountants.

 The researcher focused only on the Saudi Arabia area.

 This study used just two methods of contacting survey respondents: emailing (Microsoft Word) and face-to-face interviews for male participants and emailing only for female participants, to avoid difficulties in scheduling face- to-face interviews with women. Saudi Arabia’s cultural norms mean that it is inappropriate for a male researcher to interview female subjects.

 There are many universities and workplaces in Saudi Arabia but this study focused on the main universities and workplaces.

 There are many different generic skills but this study just focused in the main seven skills that most important for accounting students and accountants.

 This study only identified the importance of generic and technical accounting skills with accounting students and accountants in the universities and the workplaces in Saudi Arabia and did not identify the generic skills that survey respondents were actually lacking in.

55 3.9.2 Limitations

One of the main limitations of this study was the sample size, especially for the subgroup of female accountants in the workplace. The expectation in New Zealand would be for equal numbers of male and female or accountants, but this was not the case here.

One potential problem lies in collecting interview data from Saudi women. Cultural norms mean that it is inappropriate for a male researcher to interview female subjects. The researcher may therefore be able to conduct face-to-face interviews with women only if they are accompanied by the woman’s parents, husband or brother, and all participants are comfortable with the situation. Another option would be for the questionnaire to be delivered to female participants by email, thus avoiding direct personal contact, or for the questionnaire to be given to female participants in hard- copy form by their tutors or workplace managers. A third possibility would be to include face-to-face interviews with female accountants and accounting students conducted by a female researcher.

The second limitation of this research is that the boundaries between certain generic skill sets were not clear cut. This may particularly be the case in the area of presentation skills. A number of generic skills overlap. For example, problem solving skills may overlap with the capacity for analysis (analytical skills). Similarly, teamwork skills overlap with interpersonal skills, and interpersonal skills overlap with communication skills. Some of the survey respondents may have differing interpretations of these skills and this may have influenced the response. One possibility for future research may involve a second survey with a more detailed definition of the different generic and technical accounting skills being presented to the survey respondents in order to avoid any confusion.

Another area that this survey did not address was the length of time that the accountants in the workforce had actually spent in their current job. Including this factor (time spent employed as an accountant) could capture a number of shifts in the modern business world. Many researchers (see the literature review) have commented that computers have taken over many of the tasks that formerly were done by accountants themselves. An accountant who has been in the workforce for a long time may have entered the workforce in the days when the technical accounting skills were used almost exclusively and the day-to-day responsibilities of accountants involved manually filling out forms, making calculations and using ledgers. He (or, less likely in the Saudi Arabian context, she) would have noticed these changes taking place and the shift in emphasis towards a greater importance of the generic and technical accounting skills. Similarly, including the time spent in the workforce may also capture the modern shift in how accounting is taught at university, and the contrast

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between the accounting students of today and the accountants who graduated more than ten years ago may be more defined.

3.10 Summary

This study used a mixed methods approach that combined qualitative (open ended questions) and quantitative (Likert-like scales) methods to capture the maximum amount of detail possible and thus improve the overall quality of the study. The study was a cross-sectional survey, where the sample included 120 accounting students from six Saudi Arabian universities and 51 accountants employed in nine major companies in the same country. The survey was delivered by hand or via an emailed questionnaire in English and Arabic. The questions that formed the quantitative part of the survey covered the generic and technical accounting skills that respondents perceived to be important, whether or not the skill had been covered well as part of the degree course studied by the respondents, whether or not the respondents had used the skill at university, the level of skill needed to get a job as an accountant, the level of skill currently held by the respondents, the relative importance of the generic and technical accounting skills, and whether generic skills or technical accounting skills were more important. The survey also included an open-ended question that allowed respondents to list other generic skills that the study could have included.

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CHAPTER FOUR: RESULTS

This chapter presents the findings yielded by analysing the responses of the survey participants. The responses of each of the subgroups surveyed are analysed in separate subsections in this chapter. Within each section, the results investigate how each group responded to the following main research questions:

 What generic and technical accounting skills do accounting students and accountants in Saudi Arabia consider important?

 How well were the generic and technical accounting skills taught to the respondents at university?

 How well were generic and technical accounting skills used at university during their past or current tertiary studies?

 What specific skill levels are required to get a good job?

 Which specific generic and technical accounting skills, and at what level do the respondents have?

 How do the generic and technical accounting skills stack up in their degree of importance relative to each other?

 Are there any important skills missing from these questions above? Which kind of generic skills are seen as essential but have been omitted from the questionnaire?

 How do generic skills compare in importance to technical accounting skills? The raw data used in all categories used to compile the graphs used for this analysis are presented in the appendices.